I donāt agree with all you say. Well, ofcourse, I do agree that FM and Qterminal (and maybe the panel application) are the key things of LXQt (which implies Lubuntu as well).
I think the guys who āmoderateā this discourse do a great job. Donāt forget, the Lubuntu project is a volunteer project. At least, I hope that everyone who is involved here, has a steady day job.
Their effort gives starters, who just try to escape the ridiculous costly hegemony of MS, with a far less good product (with bad performance and telemetry included) a good distribution for everyday use. Lubuntu is good enough, well polished, and yeah, if you need it and seek it, the project-people on this discourse are patient, and very willing to help! Both the people who took the effort to ask something, and the respondents, in general, treat other people with respect.
I am not part of the project, but from time to time I have put in some effort on this first discourse to shaken things up a bit. Seems that was necessary on this slow discourse. When the sun setting has been completed, the audience of the second discourse will be much larger. There will be more questions and responses. This does not mean that people who will be using the second discourse have the same manners. Change of subject.
For those former Lubuntu users (like you, I guess), Arch Linux is a good choice. In my opinion the best choice. But it all depends on your views of what a distro should offer. For almost everybody I know, Lubuntu would be the perfect replacement for Windows. Only if you do state of the art development which requires (almost) the most recent versions of FOSS software, perhaps Lubuntu (and Ubuntu, and Debian, and SUSE, and Slackware) will not be the best option.
So, Lubuntu is OK, but, considering, Arch with LXQt is absolutely OK. Unfortunately, my wife refuses to use Linux (I guess because some ten years ago I always had problems with printing and scanning). Her laptop is better than my laptop, and despite that, she is always complaining that āWindowsā takes ages to update every time she logs in after a few days of idleness. She only needs the laptop for browsing and some spreadsheet work (yeah, MS, with license), but remains stubborn to switch.
Exactly for her, and millions of other people like her, Lubuntu would be perfect.
I use Arch, the Lubuntu artwork, Ubuntu fonts, Picom and Openbox, and my system looks and feels like the real thing (Lubuntu that is). And fortunately, āLook Maahā¦ no snapsā. I donāt like snaps (and the business model behind it) or flatpaks, but for the majority of Lubuntu users snaps and paks are perfect.
Offside: if you need more convincing to use Arch, tell me
Iāll help you if needed.